For more than two years, faculty, student organizations and community volunteers have been working to restore land east of campus to a native prairie.

“Eighteen thousand years ago there was a glacier there. After European settlement, it was converted to pasture,” said Jim Colbert, associate professor of botany. “What we’re trying to do is remove all the young trees that have come up in the past 20 years.”

Jim Pease, assistant professor of animal ecology, said two summers ago, 20 4-H members spent an afternoon beginning to clear the site. Since then, there have been various cleanup days, including one last Sunday. Colbert said there will be additional work days in the spring, if the weather is suitable.

Work days in December and February were really warm and brought out around 40 volunteers, while “a dozen hearty souls” braved Sunday’s weather to continue work on the project, Pease said.

Bradey McDeid, junior in liberal arts and sciences, said he worked for about an hour and a half Sunday.

“I thought it was fun,” said McDeid, member of the Student Environmental Council. “They had chain saws. You had to watch out for trees falling down. It was kind of exciting.”

Colbert said the 15-acre site across from the women’s soccer fields served as a university horse pasture until approximately 1980 when Elwood Drive was constructed.

The pasture contained a few large trees and grassy areas of non-native prairie species, he said. “Young woody plants didn’t get to start because the horses would eat them,” Colbert said.

The project began after a restoration ecology graduate class became interested in the area, Pease said.

“They thought this would be a great area to do a prairie restoration,” said Pease, chairman of the Outdoor Teaching Laboratories Committee. “They submitted a recommendation to our committee.”

Pease said the committee had worked with the city of Ames for several years when installing a bike trail through the area. The city then wanted to connect the bike trail with another trail on the south side of Lincoln Way by going through the future prairie restoration site, he said.

Pease said the two projects, the bike trail and the prairie restoration, could work together.

“The two seemed to mesh together really nicely,” Pease said. “The trail will serve as a fire break if we decide to use fire as a management tool.”

Pease said they plan to develop five to seven acres of the site into both savanna and lowland prairie environments.

“We’re hoping to plant both this spring and next fall,” Pease said.

Forbs, which are brightly colored flowering plants, will be planted this spring and native grasses will be seeded next fall. The plants will “invite people to help us dance in the prairie,” Pease said, which will help work the seed into the ground.

It will be a very diverse prairie and not “just a field of switchgrass,” Colbert said. Different species will be planted so one native grass does not grow as a monoculture, he said.

Colbert said they are currently investigating possibilities of how to fund the project. “Prairie seed, as it turns out, is quite expensive,” Colbert said.

They are hoping to make the site both visually appealing and academically useful, Colbert said. The site is easily accessible and could be used by a number of different classes.

Biology 201 lectures and labs have a large ecology component that the prairie project could enhance, Colbert said.

Pease said classes in restoration, ecology, interpretation, botany and forestry could also make use of the site.

“It is an excellent outdoor area,” Pease said. “It could be a very, very useful teaching tool.”